A beginner’s guide to seasonal eating

Eating seasonally makes perfect sense in a perfect world - but it can feel like a hard thing to do in the real world. Katie from House of Humble explains why eating locally and seasonally is easier than you think.

Seasonal eating means consuming produce according to when it is naturally available. This means fruits and vegetables are grown and sold locally, in their natural climate conditions, and picked when they are ripe and at their flavour and nutritional peak. It’s simple enough in theory, but in a day and age when you can find pineapple in a Victorian supermarket in the middle of winter, many of us are totally out of touch with seasonal food cycles. Eating with the seasons requires parting with the idea of having all fruits and vegetables available to us at all times, but it has some amazing benefits.

Why eat seasonally?

Cost

Out of season produce is either grown a long distance from where it is sold, in large greenhouses that mimic the weather of another season or kept in cold storage for a prolonged period. It requires a great deal of fuel to transport food long distances and huge amounts of energy to run greenhouses and refrigeration facilities. Of course, the cost of all of this fuel and energy is passed on to the consumer. The less energy required getting the food to the consumer, the lower the price at the register will be.

Environmental impact

It goes without saying that burning all that fuel to grow, store and transport out-of-season produce has a huge environmental impact. Eating with the seasons and shopping locally is an effective way to reduce your food miles and minimise the carbon footprint of your diet.

Nutritional value

Many of the nutrients contained in fruit and vegetable are unstable and begin to breakdown as soon as they are picked. Out of season produce spends days, weeks or even months in refrigerated storage and transit, so their nutrients can be quite depleted by the time they reach your plate. Eating fruit and veggies when they are in season means the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, antioxidants and phytochemicals that they contain are freshest, offering the most nutritional value. Another great benefit of seasonal eating is that it creates variety in our diet, allowing us to receive a wider range of nutrients. If we eat the same foods all year round we don’t get the diverse range of nutrients that we receive if our diet changes with the seasons.

Taste

It’s not only the nutritional value of food that is depleted when grown in unnatural conditions, transported huge distances and stored for prolonged periods. Each of these practices has a terrible effect on taste too. Fresh produce picked when it is naturally ripe is always tastier than food that has been grown out of season, or picked too soon and then held in transit or storage. An apple picked and eaten in autumn will be crisp and delicious, but if stored in refrigeration for several months, the same apple will likely become mealy and flavourless. Similarly, you cannot compare a pale tomato grown in a greenhouse and picked too early, to a red and juicy homegrown tomato that has been allowed to ripen over summer.

How to eat seasonally

Grow your own

The simplest way to eat seasonally is to grow your own fruit and vegetables. Homegrown produce is as cheap, fresh, nutritious and delicious as possible, with zero food miles attached. Not every household has the space for a full veggie patch but we can all manage a few pots of tomatoes or a window box of herbs. When it comes to basil picked fresh from the plant, versus basil packed in a plastic sleeve and shipped hundreds of kilometres, there is no comparison. Fresh is always best.

Shop local

If you are unable to grow your own produce or you need to supplement your homegrown harvest, shopping direct from farmers at your local farmer’s market is the next best option. When you buy locally grown foods, not only will they be fresher, more nutritious and yummier, but your money will be returning to the local economy and supporting your community. For those who don’t have time to get to the farmers market or don’t have one in their local area, there are a range of companies now offering home delivered boxes of fresh, local produce direct from farmers.

Learn what is in season

No matter how hard we try to grow our own and shop locally, most of us will need to buy some produce from the supermarket or greengrocers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still eat seasonally. Learn what’s in season throughout the year so that when you are in a store you will know which items are going to be the freshest. Check out this seasonal food guide and look for produce labelled “new season”.

Preserve

Eating seasonally doesn’t necessarily mean you cannot have kale in summer and peaches in winter. It’s simply a matter of learning how to preserve produce when it is at its most abundant. Vegetables can be pickled or blanched and frozen, fruits can be canned, dehydrated or made into jam, herbs can be dried or made into pesto and tomatoes can be made into sauce and bottled. There are many wonderful options for preserving fresh produce so that it will keep for another season.